The Long Way Back

By Melody Clark
Page 1 of 51

His name was Ago Taro, but his maquisard called him The Emperor of
Dust.

He had been second-string
Federation all his adult life, with alliances in the front office as
well as the black market. Yet he was never to have his good name
tarnished, never to fall from grace, always able to skip a rank or
take another
name.

In the wake of some minor scandal,
he was recalled only vaguely by those whose memories had currency to
Federation Authority. They recalled him as a cipher, a dour sort who
kept his place and always met his quota. Nothing remarkable enough...
not even remarkable in his mediocrity... to merit notice. Just one
more adequate Federation
cog.

Those on Fate's bad side enough to
be placed in his charge, did remember him, but even their dim
familiarity spawned only an impotent scorn. He was bland and faceless
even in cruelty. If someone had taken a survey from the Refederation
powers, of the most likely Taro candidates from among the Space
Commanders (and it was known - or half-suspected - that Taro once had
been one), this man's name would never have been mentioned. There was
nothing in him to inspire greatness, of whatever sort, nothing to
augur a leader of
men.

It had happened with Star
One.

When Star One fell, to let the
cold insouciance of the galaxy inside, most had fled in mindless
terror. The empowered and the small: the pure majesty of this omen
fell on them like a super-nova to a blind man's
eyes.

But Taro had known it as a signal,
a message from his one true sovereign, that force onto which his
computer terminal had stumbled one bland, mid-Equinox morning: that
system of insoluble Truth he had known immediately was the one true
god. It became his ally, it became his friend. It asked him questions,
it gave him
answers.

And when the Star fell, the voice
of his ancient god spoke to him, amid the peril of disillusionment,
instructing him to take up arms against those who had bequeathed him
only their despair, who had built him a whole, pure vision, then
disabled it. He had lived among them, eaten bread off their laden
tables, laughed at their sad attempts at humour, but he had never let
them touch him, because he knew they lived in lies. They had not kept
the faith. He had refused to love
them.

God had reached down his mighty
hand and destroyed Star One, for his
sake.

And it was up to Ago Taro to take
this music of chaos and spin it into the whole, pure vision - the
mighty kingdom of God. He would enforce its walls against the divisive
mind of Natas. His god would tell him what was Right, indisputably
Right, the doctrine that could not be disputed by the masses nor
denied by the dark voice of Natas whispering in his mind. Together, he
and the True God would spread their bounty across the limitless
stars.

And then would come their true
campaign - One worthy of His Greatness. To wait for the one who could
awaken Natas, who could stir that once-dark dragon from its dreamless
sleep. Then they would follow its coward's flight into the void. And
then could Taro's maquisard storm the doors of Natas' star and strike
the dragon down once and for
all.

But first his God was in need of
soldiers to his
Cause.

His hand was moved in the
selections. They would take of the incorrigibles among the old
Federation guard, those without education to inspire intellect, those
who had murdered and plundered. They would take of the unrepentant
crimos, likewise. Through subtle retraining and the stimulation of
their half-formed consciences into a usable guilt, hewn of the regret
hiding in the reaches of all men's souls, they would marshal it,
nurture it. Then give it absolution. Give their guilt oblivion in the
blessed surrender of autonomy. To such men haunted with regret, giving
up their own minds would be a sacrament. Guilt was the bridge: with
it, he could storm their
souls.

And just as the One True God
commanded, it was so. Taro had his maquisard. A fighting force
unparalleled.

It started slowly. First a little
border world, then another, larger one, usually with a spare
population of the very young and the very old, the fighting age having
been conscripted to colonial industry. Soon, they had brutalized and
ransomed their way into minority status in the Borderworld
Quorum.

Slowly, the indigenous lost
ground. The homeworld sovereigns were put to death. Taro took control.
Thereupon, he issued his first ultimatum to the Terran-based
Refederation. This had been the week of the celebration, marking four
years since the opening of the Terran domes, the day before Councillor
Avon - the President's closest advisor - tried to take his own life,
or so the current verdict would
allow.

With it all, Taro's dispatch was
met with
silence.

Two time units later, Taro claimed
Artemis, then the neighbouring Arcturus and its outpost moon Arcadia.
On the seventh day, they claimed
Destiny.

The loss of Destiny had been
enough - an old Refederation (or more to the point, Roj Blake) ally.
It transformed the Refederation response from silence into cautious
apprehension, and their intelligence had Taro plotting the downfall of
Alpha Fatima, the Refederation's first and strongest
ally.

Vendarian was sent there - in the
wake of the Avon Problem - to counsel Taro into
surrender.

When Steavn Change took power - a
weakened and embattled power, but power regardless - he dispatched a
Stellar Intellpost to Vendarian on Alpha
Fatima.

It instructed Ambassador Vendarian
to issue their own ultimatum to Taro: that Taro was to immediately
surrender the captured homeworld governments to their own leaders. And
if he did not tacitly accept all conditions as set forth in the
mandate, the Refederation would send the full measure of its armament
against him, seize his cretin maquisard, his fleet of bastardized
Galaticrafts, and consign him to some borderworld wasteland for the
rest of his lamentable
life.

In receipt of the Intellpost,
Vendarian summoned Change over the
viscom.

"But don't you think the wording
far too inflammatory, Steavn?" Vendarian fought for reason, the image
of him on the vis-screen unaccountably old and
pale.

"I am tired of impudent
troublemakers making me lose sleep!" Change replied. "Issue that
ultimatum, Ven, as it is worded. Make no revisions. Give no ground.
Tell that smug, self-deluded little bastard to stop this circus
insurgence of his or I will personally mount the
offensive."

"Steavn, listen to reason. That
creature is insane. You don't know. You've never seen. Handing him
this tract is the same as aiming a neutron blaster at my skull and
pulling the
trigger!"

"I will do nothing!" Change roared
back. "That is all, Ven." With that, Change released the signal relay
and the face of Vendarian scattered into a blank space of undetected
wave.

The next time unit, Taro relayed a
message through the renegade sub-standard frequency. It indicated that
Taro's official response to their official ultimatum had been encoded
for automatic Terran return at 1200
hours.

At 1200 hours, a High
Council-assigned, L-type cruiser floated mechanically into landing
position. It did not respond to clearance transmissions, it simply
kept to flight plan and made a mathematically precise
landing.

Change met the cruiser at the
portwalk, as an air car towed it in for his inspection. Two Service
aides stepped forward to carefully extract the cruiser's only cargo: a
body bag. Steavn watched through a veil of fingers as the aides opened
it.

The Medtech's consensus was that
Vendarian had been dead for thirty-six hours, not having much survived
the issuance of Change's ultimatum. The Intell-text of it had been
spiked to the dead man's chest, then drawn over with a series of six
parallel lines: lines one, three, four and five, unbroken, lines two
and six were broken. Some sort of primitive binary
code.

Change merely stood there for the
longest time, staring down at the pattern that the lines formed, as if
he might perceive a meaning there. But no matter how his soul sought
answers in it, his brain found only a meaningless sequence of parallel
lines.

"What in hell have you done?"
Change whispered softly, reaching down to rip the tract from
Vendarian's body. He glanced one last time at the pale face staring
back at him with the accusation of death. "Fasten it up again," he
told one aide, handing the tract over to the other. "Go to the Index
and find out what the hell that is and what the bloody hell it
means."

It was called
Ko.

The Forty-Ninth Hexagram, of an
ancient tool of divination called the I Ching. It was the trigram
earth moving over the trigram fire - a volcano of change seething
under the crust. And when the hexagram was formed by the Yarrow, it
presaged the coming of
revolution.

The day after, Alpha Fatima's
Homeworld Parliament - newly enjoying a native peace after a long
civil war - were made prisoners of war by Taro's maquisard. The
universe's last civilization of adult Auronar were now
slaves.

Noi Tan of the High Council,
himself Auronar and, to make matters all the worse for Change, another
damnable friend and ally to Roj Blake, gripped Steavn's hand around
the merographic polyscribe and signed Change's name to the Intellpost,
this one sent out over general frequency, this one addressed to Sen
Leusip. Asking him to make contact - to discuss certain issues of
mutual
interest.